Transformative professional learning -an ecological approach to agency through critical reflection

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Transformative professional learning is an appealing construct that is under theorized. The goal of this paper is to make overt the practices that are inherent in such profound professional learning. These may otherwise be taken for granted or even underestimated. Rather than being a linear set of steps that results in the output of agency as an innate and static attribute that someone can have, we posit that agency is produced ecologically through the interplay between the three chordal dimensions of the model. Teacher agency is an important aspect of critical reflective practice and as such is an important feature of initial teacher education. This is particularly salient in the current neoliberal climate where there is a systematic attack on teacher professionalism that undermines teachers’ capacity to exert judgment and control over their own work (Biesta et al., 2015). Rather than deferring to generic and potentially ill-fitting evidence of ‘what works’, as teacher educators we can support pre-service teachers to develop the knowledge, skills and efficacy to reflexively generate practices, which are bespoke for their context. Through critical reflection, intern teachers can take aspects of different dimensions of the chordal triad to reframe perceptions and to theory-build. Transformative professional learning is therefore a potent process that can be linked with profound shifts in understandings and practice.

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